Temps says:
In a message dated 8/5/00 3:00:06 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< The unspoken corrolary to that is that no matter how evil-intended,
corporations-as-persons (forget about their state-granted charters,
suckers) have an inalienable right (presumably under the 14th
amendment) to use their massive financial resources (not excluding
govt. agricultural subsidies to tobacco farmers) to control the behavior
of the public and to inundate the public with reading matter that isn't
fit for adults or children (or beasts for that matter).
Well, the guy actually said that we natural individuals have a right to read
dreck, even tobacco adverts, presumaby, whether fit or not for us to
examine--that's our choice, not the state's. I don't suppose many ACLUniki
would give too hoots for the right of a corporation to express itself. I
haven't yet looked at the site Michael referred me to. I don't think the ACLU
ought to be defending big tobacco's right to advertise, not least because its
resources are very limited, and big tobacco can look out for itself. I do
think that big tobacco ought to be allowed to market to adults as long as
what it says in its ads is, as the standard goes, "truthful and not
misleading." But I think its own lawyers can watch out for its rights, and
indeed, ours to read its dreck, without the ACLU's help.
The story below is pure innuendo. Maybe this person thought that red-baiting
would work. Maybe he was wrong. You have no idea. I note, btw, that under no
reading of any free speech right do you have any claim on the charitable
resources of a private group. I rather doubt, and so do you, that the ACLU
would fund a neo-Nazi organization or indeed one developed to promoting
smoking. It might well be reluctant to fund a socialist group. That's not's
part of its charter.
However, you do know for sure is that if the state passes a law penalizing
left speech, or the cops start harassing you for your political activity, the
people to call are the ACLU and the NLG, and they will be there, whether you
are a Stalinist, an anarchist, a revolutionary socialist, or whatever. That's
what they're for, and these days, anyway, you can count on them. On us, I
should say.
> Back in the 1970s, I was with a group in Canada that received some funding
from the ACLU to do immigration counseling for Viet Nam war resisters. A
former member with a grudge (arising, naturally, out of personal sexual
escapades) figured he could trash the group by red-baiting us to the
ACLU. He wrote a letter falsely accusing me, my wife and three other
members of forming a trotskyist cabal that had seized the group for our
own sinister political machinations. We stopped receiving funding.
Of course, no one will ever know whether the red baiting had anything to
do with the termination of funding -- the ACLU letter cited other
priorities and limited funds. But the point is that this scum-bag wrecker
sure had it figured that red-baiting would be an effective ploy with the
ACLU moneybags.
Now, maybe if we had changed our name from the Vancouver American
Exiles Association to "Joe Camel and the neo-Nazis" . . .
>>
